A Simple But Effective Tool Everyone Should Be Using...

Is .htaccess to stop people from hotlinking your pics.

To prevent hotlinking, simple copy and paste the code below in to a text document and rename it to .htaccess and upload it to your domain root...

Code:

---

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?domain.com(/)?.*$    [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?domain.com(/)?.*$    [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|bmp)$ http://www.domain.com [R,NC]

---

Make sure you change domain.com to your domain name though for it to work.

I know this is really simple and something a lot of us are already using regularly but ive just been chatting with someone on ICQ who didnt know about this and they have been around for a year or so dealing with people hotlinking their pics!

Regards,

Lee

Thanks for the tip, Lee. I am the one that doesn't use it yet. But definitely i will do it from this moment.

Keep in mind that this will cause problems with blog readers looking at pictures.

I believe it may cause problems with HTML-based e-mails as well (but am not 100% sure on the latter).

--Aaron